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Education and Political Socialisation of a National-Colonial Political Elite in French West Africa, 1936–47

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 35; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03086530701523448

1743-9329

Tony Chafer,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Abstract Much has been written about the first generation of political leaders of French West Africa, their leadership skills, personal resources and networks. Their attachment to, and close links with, France played a crucial role in determining the pattern of decolonisation in the colony. Through a study of their political socialisation, this article seeks to throw light on the experiences and influences that fashioned their thinking about politics and created a common stock of ideas, norms and values. Focusing in particular on their education at the William Ponty School and two key moments that shaped their political thinking—the Popular Front period (1936–38) and the immediate post-war period (1944–47)—it will be argued that an appreciation of their process of political socialisation enhances our understanding of their political choices. A final section reflects on the legacy of this process in the postcolonial period. Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Emmanuel Godin and Sue Wright for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Notes 1. Cruise O'Brien, ‘The Limits of Political Choice in French West Africa: 1956–1960’. 2. Crowder, ‘Independence as a Goal in French West African Politics: 1944–60’, 40. 3. Ibid. 4. Ajayi and Crowder, eds, History of West Africa, vol. 2, 772. See also Crowder, ‘Independence as a Goal’, 40–41. 5. For a study of these early nationalists, see Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 179–85; see also Spiegler, ‘Aspects of Nationalist Thought’; Dewitte, Les Mouvements Nègres en France. 6. See Chafer, ‘Students and Nationalism’ for an analysis of the role of the student movement in the decolonisation of French West Africa. In The End of Empire in French West Africa I argue that the activities of this radical nationalist movement played a significant role in determining the pace, if not the fact, of decolonisation in the colony. 7. Wesley Johnson, ‘The Triumph of Nationalism in French West Africa’, 313, emphasis in original. 8. Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, 256. 9. Benoist, L'Afrique Occidentale Française, 69. 10. See, for example, Cruise O'Brien, Saints and Politicians; Dia, Mémoires; Baulin, La Politique intérieure and La Politique africaine; Guèye, Sur les sentiers du temple; Siriex, Félix Houphouët-Boigny; Zan, Ouezzin Coulibaly; Vaillant, French and African. 11. Schachter-Morgenthau, Le Multipartisme en Afrique de l'ouest francophone, 13–14, 21–24, acknowledges the importance of the William Ponty School, as does Le Vine, in his Political Leadership in Africa, when he mentions the ‘seminal role of the Ecole Normale William Ponty in schooling what was virtually an entire generation of African leaders’, p. 5, but he does not investigate how their education at Ponty impacted on their thinking about politics. 12. See for example Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics. 13. Mangan, Making Imperial Mentalities, 1–2. 14. Price, A Concise History of France, 197–98. 15. In this context Jean-Hervé Jézéquel usefully warns us that Ponty graduates formed ‘an educated elite that was on the contrary extremely heterogeneous and constantly subject to a whole range of centrifugal forces’. ‘Les enseignants comme élite politique’, 519–20. 16. Hunt, in her Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, 10, defines ‘political culture’ as ‘The values, expectations, and implicit rules that expressed and shaped collective intentions and actions’. 17. Rosanvallon, Le Modèle politique français. 18. Ibid., 11. 19. Sabatier, ‘Educating a Colonial Elite’, 209. 20. Benoist, La Balkanisation, 77. 21. ‘Une pépinière d'hommes politiques: L'Ecole William-Ponty’, 23. 22. All of these five were elected to the French National Assembly after the war: Félix Houphouët-Boigny and Hamani Diori in 1946, Hubert Maga in 1951 and Modibo Keita and Mamadou Dia in 1956. One of the other territories, Haute-Volta, was led by a Ponty graduate, Ouezzin Coulibaly, who was a close collaborator of Houphouët-Boigny and a leading figure in the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain. He was elected to Paris in 1946 and again in 1956 and served as the vice-president of its Government Council until 1958. But for his premature death he would almost certainly have become the first president of independent Haute-Volta (present-day Burkina Faso). Of the remaining two original territories of French West Africa, Guinée chose immediate independence in 1958 under Sékou Touré's leadership. As he was not a Ponty student, his political choices and career do not concern us here. Moktar ould Daddah, the first president of independent Mauritania, was also not a Ponty student, although he studied in France from 1948 to 1956, where he graduated in law. 23. Schachter-Morgenthau, Le Multipartisme en Afrique de l'ouest francophone, 21. 24. Bouche, ‘L'Enseignement dans les territoires français’; Chafer, ‘France's “mission civilisatrice” in Africa’, 148–58. 25. Chafer, ‘Decolonisation and the Politics of Education’, 375. 26. Schachter-Morgenthau, Le Multipartisme en Afrique de l'ouest francophone, 13. 27. Government spokesmen regularly claimed that French colonial education was assimilationist, insofar as it aimed at creating ‘a true Frenchman in language, in his soul, in his calling’. Speech by H. Gautier, private secretary to the Minister of Education, reproduced in L'adaptation de l'enseignement aux colonies, 293. However, for a systematic refutation of the notion that French education in West Africa before the end of the Second World War was assimilationist, see Bouche, ‘Autrefois, notre pays s'appelait la Gaule’, 110–22. 28. Sabatier, ‘“Elite” Education in French West Africa', 260–61. 29. Sabatier, ‘Educating a Colonial Elite’, 126. 30. Davesne, ‘Rapport sur l'AOF de l'adaptation de l'enseignement’, 93. 31. Bouche, ‘L’école rurale en Afrique Occidentale Française'. 32. Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa, 94–98. 33. Mumford, Africans Learn to be French. 34. Sabatier, ‘Educating a Colonial Elite’, 110, 127–28. 35. Sabatier, ‘“Elite” Education in French West Africa’, 265. 36. Dia, Mémoires, 20. 37. Ibid., 22. 38. Bouche, ‘Autrefois, notre pays s'appelait la Gaule’, 117. 39. Dia, Mémoires, 29. 40. Sabatier, ‘Educating a Colonial Elite’, 83. Sabatier points out that this identification of Pontins with the conquerors of French West Africa was actually accurate insofar as African soldiers provided most of the manpower to ‘pacify’ French West Africa. 41. Bernard Dadié, Carnets de prison, 262, cited in Coulibaly, ‘Elites “évoluées” et populations “indigènes” en Côte d'Ivoire’, 326. The capitalisation is in the original. It should be noted that the great uncle with whom he identifies was killed by the Akoué because he was suspected of collaborating with the French. 42. Sabatier, ‘Educating a Colonial Elite’, 82–83. 43. ‘Circulaire sur la réorganisation de l'enseignement’, Journal Officiel de l'AOF, supplement, 10 May 1924, 339. 44. The notion of the African instituteur as a ‘model’ is a recurrent theme in the responses to the 1944 survey (see n. 49 below). For a description of how French teachers were viewed in Third Republic France, see Wright, France in Modern Times, 247. 45. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 83. 46. Sabatier, ‘Educating a Colonial Elite’, 109. 47. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 81–86. By 1939 the majority of European teachers in French West Africa were no longer teaching and instead had taken on a largely supervisory function vis-à-vis their African colleagues; see Sabatier, ‘Educating a Colonial Elite’, 283; ‘Annual report on school year 1938–39’, AAOF (Archives de l'Afrique Occidentale Française) [Dakar] 2G39/92, 6. 48. Sabatier, ‘“Elite” Education in French West Africa’, 252. Moreover, of the five future political leaders mentioned above, Diori, Maga, Keita and Dia all graduated from Ponty's teaching section. Houphouët-Boigny in contrast trained as a medical assistant. 49. The first survey was organised by the then Director of Ponty, Charles Béart, who received responses from fifty-one ex-Ponty instituteurs. The second was a much larger survey, to which 517 instituteurs and 378 pupils (from Ponty and the Frédéric Assomption School in Bamako) replied. The returns from both surveys are available in the Archives: AAOF 075/31 for the 1938 survey and 0345/31 for responses to 1944 survey. The tables collating the results of the latter are not however available in the Archives and were kindly provided to me by Roger Dumargue from his personal archives. I have reproduced these in Chafer, ‘Decolonisation and the Politics of Education’, 413–24, in order to make them more widely available. 50. Sabatier, ‘“Elite” Education in French West Africa’, 265–66. 51. See also Cutter, ‘The Genesis of a Nationalist Elite’, 118–19, for a discussion of the treatment by the colonial administration of members of the French-educated elite which suggests that their elite status was in practice often perceived ambivalently by French officials. 52. Coulibaly, ‘Elites “évoluées” et populations “indigènes” en Côte d'Ivoire’, 347. 53. See, for example, Governor-General Brévié's comments about bringing into being a new ‘Franco-African culture’ in his opening address to the Government Council of French West Africa on 24 December 1932, reported in the Bulletin de l'Enseignement de l'AOF, 80, July–December 1932, 171. As Gary Wilder has pointed out, this vision of a new Franco-African culture was shared by African intellectuals in the négritude movement at this time; see Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, esp. 5–9, 43–117, 232–55. 54. Bernard-Duquenet, Le Sénégal et le Front Populaire, 65–66; Person, ‘Le Front populaire au Sénégal’, 88. 55. Cutter, ‘The Genesis of a Nationalist Elite’, 120–8. 56. Paris-Dakar, 28 Sept. 1936, 3, 5. 57. Chafer and Sackur, eds, French Colonial Empire and the Popular Front, 16–17. 58. The Radical former colonial minister Albert Sarraut had expressed this view in his Grandeur et servitude coloniales, 106. Cf. also Girardet, L'Idée coloniale en France, 193–95. As Martin Thomas rightly points out, the notion of colonisation altruiste is somewhat misleading, since ‘Popular Front reformers never challenged a racially ordered colonial system, believing that the white man's burden derived from the innate superiority of republican cultural values’. The French Empire between the Wars, 277. 59. Cutter, ‘The Genesis of a Nationalist Elite’, 121. 60. Person, ‘Le Front populaire au Sénégal’, 100. This was also confirmed in a personal communication to the author by Amadou Ndene Ndaw, Dakar, 31 March 1990. 61. Ginio, French Colonialism Unmasked, 115, 173–79. 62. Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars, 277. 63. Speech quoted in full in Gbagbo, Réflexions sur la conférence de Brazzaville, 66–69. 64. The Constitution of the Fourth Republic stated that: ‘France forms with its overseas peoples a Union founded on equality of rights and duties, without distinction of race or religion’. 65. Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa, 93–94, 99. 66. Ginio, French Colonialism Unmasked, 178. 67. Cf. Person, ‘Le Front populaire au Sénégal’, 82, 86–87; speech by Senghor on 10 Sept. 1937 to the Dakar Chamber of Commerce, reproduced in Liberté 1, 19–20; Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 201–55. 68. Suret-Canale, Les Groupes d'Etudes Communistes, 24. 69. Ibid., 24–25. 70. Dozon, Frères et sujets, 330. J. Suret-Canale also refers to Communist activists who created a Communist study group at Ponty in the 1930s, describes the friendships that developed between Communists and French-educated Africans in French West Africa and publishes photos of those involved in his Les Groupes d'Etudes Communistes, 39, 44, 183–84. 71. Since the Popular Front period the Communist Party had repositioned itself as a French national party that ‘assiduously cultivated patriotism, casting the workers as the heirs of 1789 and the true guardians of the republic’. Evans and Godin, France 1815–2003, 101. 72. Suret-Canale, Les Groupes d'Etudes Communistes, 54–68. 73. Newspapers such as Le Réveil and its supplement Dakar-Jeunes in Senegal and L'Observateur du Soudan adopted a broadly left republican stance. Widely read by French-educated Africans, they were harshly critical of the colonial regime. Such ideas also circulated through the activities of the Comités d'Etudes Franco-Africaines (CEFA), which sprung up in many urban centres of French West Africa after the war; see Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa, 70–72. See also below. 74. Dalloz, Textes sur la décolonisation, 35–36. 75. Suret-Canale, Les Groupes d'Etudes Communistes, 69. 76. Undated circular sent out to all CEFA sections, AAOF 17G526/144. 77. Letter from CEFA, Dakar, to Senghor, 25 Feb. 1944, AAOF 17G127/17. 78. Réveil was originally produced by the France combattante group. It was edited by Charles-Guy Etcheverry, a Socialist local councillor who joined the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain in 1948 and effectively made the newspaper the mouthpiece of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain. As for the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), it was important in terms of promoting radical anti-imperialist ideas in French West Africa and simultaneously cementing a network of enduring links between French and African trade unionists. There is insufficient space to discuss this dimension here. However it has been thoroughly covered in Delanoue, ‘La CGT et les syndicats de l'Afrique noire de colonisation française’ and Dewitte, ‘La CGT et les syndicats d'Afrique occidentale française’. 79. In this context, it should be noted that the term ‘liberal’ in the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain manifesto quoted above should not be interpreted in an Anglo-Saxon sense as referring either to free markets or pluralist politics; ‘liberal’ here is used in the French sense to refer to the liberty that is the product of social and economic development and modernisation. 80. Dozon, Frères et sujets, 335. 81. For a fuller discussion of the influence of French political culture on Francophone Africa, see LeVine, Politics in Francophone Africa, esp. 96– 103.